


Ghosts

by Barkour



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode Tag, F/M, Gen, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-09
Updated: 2013-04-09
Packaged: 2017-12-08 00:33:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/754894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of "Ghost in the Machine," Scully and Mulder discuss trust.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written in May 2012.

The phone rang. The tub had half-filled, hot water near to misting as it poured out, down into the rising cascade of bubbles she'd laced the tub with beforehand. Scully had her fingers under the faucet only a moment, long enough to register the heat of it; then the phone rang again. Grimacing, she shook her hand. Droplets spritzed the wallpaper. She straightened. As she did so, movement flickered in her peripheral vision, the suggestion of a pale figure rising outside the window. Instinct guided her hand to her hip for a holster, and a firearm, that she had shed. 

No need. It was only her reflection, distorted by the glass and the night. Accelerated heart rate, elevated respiration, a certain tension in her shoulders: she noted these with distant irritation. The fright was irrational. Tooms was incarcerated, his sentence under review for potential relocation to a sanitarium. No one hunted her. The roar of the water as it plunged into the tub deafened. Not quite enough: she heard the phone ring again. 

Scully closed her eyes. A mistake. With her eyes closed, she saw again that dimly lit duct, her light flashing as it bounced off one metal wall and then the other before skittering the remaining length of the duct to the fan below. The water thrumming was that fan humming, its whine echoing in the duct so that an unthinking and primal terror had clenched in her chest, her gut. This same terror had driven her to dig her fingers in harder still into the ungiving metal in the mindless presumption that, like a cornered cat sinking its claws into wood, she might hook her fingers within the metal and so hold herself there against the combined forces of gravity and that ceaseless artificial wind that tore at her, dragged at her, beat her about her head and shoulders. With the deprivation of but one sense her mind retreated to recent, powerful sensory memories. She opened her eyes again.

The phone rang again; once more and it would go to the answering machine. It occurred to her to simply ignore it. Hadn't she earned a night's respite from telemarketers, her aunt, a wrong number? She left the bath to its work. Calmness came to her. It was the certainty a man resigned to the guillotine knew. She picked up the phone. As she did so, that placid quality hardened; an anger came into her, too. She thought: She would fight it; whatever that agent of whatever agency claimed, Scully had made the necessary decision to mitigate the possibility of future deaths at the hands of -- her mind rebelled, logic insisting that it could not be, it was not possible, the technological advances that would support the birth of an artificial intelligence had not themselves been born of man's ingenuity, and yet she had seen the evidence of its existence; she had witnessed its death when it would have killed her. And yet it had not lived; how could it have thought? Was it not possible that Wilczek had in fact programmed the system to act out against threats to his work and then to the reality of his crime, and that when confronted with his actions he had admitted guilt?

The phone was in her hand; it was at her ear. She said, "This is Dana."

"If it's okay with you, I'll stick with Scully. More intimate."

Mulder. Her shoulders drooped; her back eased. She leaned back against the high table, touching a thumb to her eyebrow.

"Mulder, I'm running a bath."

He made an _ooo_ sound. "Sounds sexy, Scully."

"Mulder--" Her fingers were at her cheek. She felt the smile pulling at her mouth, the little muscles in her face stretching to allow for the expression. She hadn't meant to smile.

"Nothing hotter than some good, old-fashioned personal hygiene," said Mulder.

She pushed off the table. "Is there any particular reason you needed to speak with me, or did you hit the wrong button on your speed dial?"

"Surely you don't mean to suggest I'd dirty talk Mr Yang," drawled Mulder, "whose sweet and sour pork, by the way, virtually guarantees his place among the finest chefs in all the D.C. metropolitan area."

"I meant to suggest you have a 1-900 hotline on your speed dial," said Scully, stopping to test the water again. She swirled her fingers gently through the bubbles, cutting trails through the soft, white mounds.

" _A_ 1-900 hotline? Why, Scully," said Mulder, his voice low and warm across the line, "your discretion flatters me."

She flicked the bubbles from her hand and twisted the water off. The bathroom mirror had fogged in her absence, and the bubbles lipped at the tub's outward curling rim. With the one hand, she began untying her bathrobe. She swapped the phone to her other ear, balanced it on her shoulder, too.

"I really do need to get to bed."

"I won't keep you," he said. 

The faucet dripped once, twice, two hot drops; then the water stopped. Her robe fell open, gaping so the swell of her right breast showed. Scully wrapped her arm around her waist, pinning the robe there. Another irrational thought, to assume in some way her nakedness would be known by Mulder as fact. She yanked her robe open and off. 

"I just wanted to say," said Mulder, pausing again. "Thank you. For trusting me earlier."

Steam clouded the mirror. The window was dark, each pane showing only night and nothing more. Scully looked to the robe pooled at her feet and then to that black window, the night beyond. The sky was hazy, stained with the city' omnipresent light pollution.

"As your hypothesis was proved correct," she said, "that the COS was responsible for the murders of two people and for the attempted murder of myself, it would have been imprudent to allow some man, who hadn't positively identified himself as a government operative, control over the system, if the system could even be controlled."

"I owe myself five dollars," Mulder said. "I was betting you'd been brooding."

She sighed. "I don't brood, Mulder. You brood."

"I notice you evaded my gratitude."

"Much like you're evading my correction," she said.

"I know you don't believe," said Mulder. "I know that you're probably at this very minute thinking of an alternative, rational explanation for the events at Eurisko that would absolve the artificial intelligence of the facts of its existence--"

It was easy, then, to give voice to her doubts, to lend them the credence of being spoken aloud. She nearly convinced herself saying it, so steady was her voice, so regular the rhythms. 

"Wilczek could have easily programmed subroutines into the system that would enable it to act not in its own defense or on its own desires, but on Wilczek's. The COS was a tool--"

"Maybe," said Mulder, "but you still trusted me to kill it."

She looked to the mirror set above the sink, but on the chair, and at that angle, she was too far down and too far set to the right of it to see more than the very top of her head, blurred. She would need to bleach her hair again soon, lest the red take over as, inevitably, it would.

"Of course I trusted you," she said at last. "You're my partner." 

That came easy, too. Scully stared at the strawberry blonde crest of her hair so faint through the mist on the mirror and knew that the truth would out itself one way or another. Her roots bled.

Mulder said, "Yeah," and he said it quietly. 

She thought of Jerry, murdered. Several contusions. The brain, swollen. Two broken fingers from where he had grabbed for the railing to prevent his feet from sliding out the doors; from there, his legs, then his waist, his body chewed up by the momentum of the elevator's descent and the uncaring concrete. Goosebumps littered her skin. Bubbles popped, tiny static sounds refined to greatness by her silence and Mulder's, too.

"Do you remember when we first met?"

"Of course I remember," said Mulder. "That was, what, last week?"

She smiled. "Longer than that."

"Oh, wait," he said, laughing, "I remember now."

"You thought I was a spy, sent to shut you down."

He was quiet, but only for a moment. "I did think that."

It was the stop that had killed Jerry at the end.

"Do you trust me now?" she asked, thinking of: how easy it had been even at the start, how Mulder had smiled meanly then she had smiled back and the shape of his mouth changed in reply, how her sarcasm had infected him with delight, how he hadn't been spooky at all but only weird. His fingertips at the small of her back. The little laugh she'd startled out of him when she turned and hugged him.

Mulder breathed out. She did not look away from the implication of her partial reflection in the mirror above the sink.

"Of course I trust you," said Mulder. "You're my partner."

She folded her arm around her bared stomach. Now, she looked away.

"I have to go."

"See you in the morning, Scully," said Mulder.

"Good night," said Scully.

The phone went silent. She rubbed her thumb across the receiver and then she set the phone down on the toilet and stood to get in the bath. The water was still hot; she welcomed the bite of it. She needed to clear her head out. For every mystery there is an explanation; every question has a solution, even if it may not yet be known. Mulder was charismatic and cute, as she had said to Karen, though she wished she hadn't. Stop overthinking it and put it away, she thought. He was her partner. Of course she trusted him. Of course she cared about him. He was her partner. Any hypersensitivity to his presence would ease with the passage of time and the assumption of familiarity. Already she found his occasional flashes of juvenile, ribald humor annoying, his purposefully obtuse presentations vexatious, and his confidence in his theories as aggravating as he no doubt found her confidence in her theories. Time would take care of the rest. Easy.

Scully leaned her head back against the tub. Behind her eyes, the fan turned and turned. She thought of the rigor of paperwork. Too soon to presume she would not be held accountable for the loss of the COS and the supposed intelligence it housed. More paperwork, then. Potentially a committee review. A mark on her file if her actions were not deemed worthy of transferring her to a post even less desirable than the X-Files. Two years out of the academy, she thought; but she had not put the gun down. She would not have put it down. 

Instead, she sank down into the bubbles and let the hot water take her.


End file.
